Hangman

Ten strokes of the pencil: hangman, taken seriously

Hangman is the game nobody remembers learning — it arrives somewhere around the same time as riding a bike, passed along on the back of a school worksheet. Which is exactly why it deserves better than the usual lazy version. This one deals 1,500 everyday words plus 350 themed ones, grades every single word by simulating a perfect player against it, and prices the hint at exactly what it's worth.

• 1,500 everyday words in the classic pool, each one graded by a solver
• 350 themed words across animals, food & drink and countries
• 6 the most misses perfect play ever needs here — anything crueller was thrown out of the pool

How this version plays

The rules are the ones you know. A secret word appears as a row of blank tiles; you guess letters one at a time, on screen or on your keyboard. A correct letter fills in every square it owns. A wrong one draws part of the picture — four strokes of gallows first, then the little fellow in six — and the tenth miss finishes both the drawing and the round. Guess every letter first and he stays unfinished, which has always been the game's quiet, macabre little joke.

Two choices set up each round. The difficulty — easy, medium or hard, and more on what those mean in a moment — and the category. The Classic pool plays it straight: an everyday word, no clue. The themed pools — animals, food & drink, countries — tell you the category up front, the way the game is usually played aloud, and the way its Victorian ancestor was played on slates. When a round ends you can copy a spoiler-free result, or a challenge link that deals a friend the exact word you just faced. Wins, streaks and flawless rounds are tracked per difficulty and stay on your device; there's no account and nothing is sent anywhere.

Every word here was play-tested by a machine

Most hangman sites sort words by length and call the long ones hard. That gets hangman exactly backwards, so we did something more honest: before a word is allowed anywhere near this page, a solver plays a full game against it.

1. It guesses the best letter available. The solver knows the whole dictionary and always picks the letter found in the most words that still fit — the strongest opponent we know how to code.
2. It prunes after every answer. Guess E, watch it land in the second and fifth squares, and only words with an E in precisely those spots survive. The candidate list collapses with each reply.
3. Its wrong guesses become the word's score. The easy third of the pool falls with almost no misses; the hard third makes even perfect play sweat. Bands are the terciles of that score — nobody declares a difficulty by hand.
4. Anything crueller than six misses is thrown out. If flawless play with a dictionary for a brain needs seven of your ten lives, a human was never really in the game and “you lose” was decided at the deal.

Every word that reaches the board is beatable with room to spare.

The short words are the killers

Here is what the measurement actually found, computed fresh from the pool every time this site is built. Remember that nothing in the grading looks at how long a word is.

The easy words are the long ones. If that feels upside down, think about what a guess buys you. A long word is a wide net: eight or nine squares can hardly help containing E, A and R, each hit narrows the field, and the word assembles itself. A four-letter word offers almost nothing to hold on to — three or four distinct letters, one vowel, and a pattern like _ O _ _ that fits dozens of candidates, most of which you'll pay a life apiece to eliminate. Add a rare letter and it gets cruel. When a Wolfram Research mathematician simulated some fifteen million hangman games in 2010 to find the deadliest words in a 90,000-word dictionary, the champion at every lives-count he tested was JAZZ — four letters, three of them among the rarest in English, and a doubled Z that pays out just one square when you finally find it. His conclusion matches ours: mistake rates are highest on short words, because the fewer distinct letters a word shows, the longer a guesser gropes without a hit. Long looks scary; short is scary.

Where to open, measured against this pool

Every hangman player inherits the same folk strategy — vowels first, then the reliable consonants. The received wisdom comes from general English letter frequency, the famous ETAOIN order. But hangman doesn't care how often a letter occurs in running text; it cares how many words contain it at least once, which is a different table. Here is that table, measured across the words this game actually deals.

• E 58%
• A 47%
• R 44%
• T 36%
• O 36%
• L 34%
• I 31%
• S 30%
• The habit worth breaking
• S 30%

S is a top-four letter in most dictionaries and only 8th here, because this pool deliberately filters out plurals and bolted-on verb endings — a secret word wearing an -S or an -ED is a dull secret. Your S-first habit is a leak on this page.

Once a few letters land, stop counting frequencies and start reading shapes: an _ _ _ T I O N tail, or a Q begging for its U, tells you more than any table can.

A hint with an honest price tag

Pricing it that way settles a question most versions fudge. A flawless round — solving without a single stroke drawn — can't be bought, only earned, so it gets its own counter in your stats without any bookkeeping behind it. Giving up shows you the word but voids the round; like every game on this site, the numbers only ever count honest play.

Older than the gallows, and politer too

The game is comfortably older than its drawing. Its clearest recorded ancestor sits in Alice Bertha Gomme's Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1894) under the name Birds, Beasts and Fishes: a slate game in which the setter wrote an animal name's first and last letters with crosses standing in for the rest, announced whether it was bird, beast or fish, and the others took turns guessing the whole name — scoring a mark for every cross when they got it. Notice what's missing: no gallows, no letter-by-letter guessing, and no losing a life. Category up front, though — which is exactly how our themed pools play, a hundred and thirty years later. The hanging arrived on record in 1902, when an American newspaper described party guests playing the game beneath the little scaffold; how the Victorians' polite slate exercise picked up an execution along the way, nobody has ever documented.

Even the count was never settled — there is no official number of lives in hangman, and there never has been.

We land in the British tradition, and with ten lives the pool's never-worse-than-six guarantee leaves real room to be wrong. From there the game went everywhere. Merv Griffin turned the hangman he'd played on car trips with his sister into Wheel of Fortune in 1975. The 1973 book 101 BASIC Computer Games carried a hangman program into the first home-computer bedrooms, and by 1978 it was an Atari cartridge. Computer science eventually returned the favour with "evil hangman," a Stanford teaching classic from 2008 in which the program never commits to a word at all — it quietly herds the dictionary between your guesses so that whatever you pick was wrong. That dictionary-partitioning trick is, pointed the fair way round, precisely how our difficulty solver measures every word this page deals.

And because plenty of teachers would rather not sketch an execution in front of seven-year-olds, classrooms have quietly invented gentler scaffolds for decades — a snowman melting, an apple tree losing its apples, a spaceman drifting off. We've kept the classic drawing, done playfully, with one concession our forebears never offered: on this page, ten lives and a fair word are guaranteed. The fellow on the gallows has never been safer.

Made to be someone's first word game

Hangman is most people's first word game, so this page is built to be handed to a kid. Easy mode deals genuinely common words — measured, not guessed at. The themed categories give a young player the same head start the Victorian version gave: knowing it's an animal turns a wall of blanks into a guessing game they can win. Every word in every pool is family-friendly, because on this site that's true everywhere, always. And when they're ready to graduate: the word guess game is hangman's deduction-loving descendant, the letter wheel rewards the vocabulary hangman builds, and the codewords grids scratch the same letters-hiding-something itch at full crossword size. Same deal on all of them: free, no signup, no daily ration.